I was recently talking to an acquaintance and saying that I had decided to invest some money in a 'Netbook'.  Although my present laptop is functioning OK - touch wood! - it is very greedy on electricity.  I hate running the engine unnecessarily and my (cracked) solar panel isn't too efficient.  But someone told me he could get a good deal on a computer with a solid-state hard drive and a six-cell battery, both of which, he assured me, would mean that I could run the machine on its own battery for about 6 hours at a time.  And the netbook is small and light - much easier to take ashore to an Internet Cafe.

So I was saying all this, and how great it would be to reduce my electricity consumption and be able to write emails and my blog and so on.

'Yes,' quoth he, 'it should be great.  And you know, you can get all sorts of navigation software to run on Netbooks.'

Please engage brain before speaking, I thought.  But smiled and said, 'I don't think so,' and left it at that.

My first musing is that I wished I hadn't used the word 'subversive'.  I'm what might be termed a dyslexic touch-typist, which is to say that I constantly juxtapose my keys.  My fingers really get entangled around the word 'subversive'.